Scarface is one of Brian De Palma’s signature films; it’s got a big budget, a celebrated actor in the lead with Al Pacino, an almost three-hour run-time, and some serious critical cred courtesy of Roger Ebert.
Unfortunately, the blockbuster trappings which have made it one of the director’s better-known movies are the same blockbuster trappings which make it one of his least characteristic—and one of his least interesting. De Palma’s games with gaze, identity, Hitchcock, Freud, sex, and split screens are all abandoned. Instead we get a by-the-numbers Oliver Stone-penned crime film with predictable beats, predictable hyper violence, and a predictable moral. Crime, it turns out, doesn’t pay. Shocker.
As is generally the case in these stories, the protagonist, Tony Montana (Pacino) starts out with little to nothing; he’s a small-bit Cuban thug who Castro expels from the island in a 1980 purge of dissidents and prisoners. Tony ends up in an immigrant detention camp in Miami but gets out by assassinating a former Communist official who fell out with leadership. After that, it’s an inevitable but lengthy trip to the drug trade, escalating violence, escalating money, the brutal death of everyone Tony’s pretended to care about, and that famous final scene with Pacino snorting from a table full of coke and machine gunning a plethora of invaders in his mansion in a pointless egotistical last stand.
De Palma’s best movies are genuinely horny and sexy, and (not coincidentally) genuinely interested in women’s lives and perspectives. Scarface though is set in a world of machismo so all-encompassing that there’s little space for romance or even sex. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the girlfriend/moll/object of desire, but she doesn’t have much to do except wear clingy clothes and look stunning; it’s hard to imagine her and Pacino having less chemistry.
The other woman in the movie is Tony’s sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), with whom he has an abusive and controlling relationship. She suggests he’s motivated by incestuous desire, but again the movie doesn’t do much to explore that; emotional revelations are all drowned out by machine gun fire and blood.
De Palma often enjoys playing with identification, encouraging viewers to place themselves in the position of people who are divided, disempowered, or gender-swapped. The closest Scarface comes to that kind of slippery shell game with consciousness is a pro forma scene in which a drunk Tony staggers around a restaurant telling the other diners that they enjoy watching “bad men” like him.
The diners are obviously stand-ins for the movie audience, and the script’s intended to implicate the viewers. Movie-goers are all, supposedly, condemning the bad guy even as they enjoy the genre pleasures and violence. The shifting of blame is too glib to be effective—especially when the movie shortly thereafter goes out of its way to have Tony refuse to kill some children. If you’re taunting the audience with their investment in this toxic asshole, why this desperate effort to make him the good guy and insist there are some lines he won’t cross?
The answer is that in crime films the bad guy always has a code, there are shades of gray, you’re supposed to ask who is really the criminal here, etc. Scarface is a genre exercise, and it’s committed to fulfilling genre expectations.
And so Pacino hams it up. De Palma orchestrates spectacular violent set pieces. Michelle Pfeiffer looks great in a variety of outfits. Giorgio Moroder provides a sleazy synth-heavy Eurodisco soundtrack. Everybody shouts “fuck” a lot. If that’s what you want, Scarface delivers. If what you want is De Palma being his weird De Palma self, though, this is a very long disappointment.